This blog is to encorporate discussions on Lost Continents, Catastrophism, The origin of Modern Humans and the Out of Africa theory, Genetics and Human Diversity, The Origin and Spread of Civilization and Cultural Diffusion across the face of the Globe.

Deluge of Atlantis

Deluge of Atlantis

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

While looking up material on the subject of comets and catastrophes in ancient times I came upon the work of a Nederlandisch Chemist who wrote about Megalithic Monuments, one Dr. Reinard deJonge and the site in question is: http://www.barry.warmkessel.com/dejonge.html

Dr. DeJonge's theses include the theory that the Megalith-builders were sun-worshippers that systematically explored the world and made records of their discoveries upon the standing stones of Europe. That is not an aspect of his work which I am addressing at this time. DeJonge says that a number of Megalithic monuments in Brittany recorded the great Flood of Noah in 2344 BC and this killed of 54% of the world's population (a significant difference from Genesis!) Here is his list of cometary catastrophes with the dates highlighted:

And the one I wanted to draw particular attention to was this rather small menhir from Kermovan (The Kermorvan menhir, Brittany, France)
"The menhir of Kermorvan and the comet grave of Mougau-Bihan were built on exactly the same latitude line in Brittany, France. The menhir of Kermorvan at Le Conquet, on the western tip of the peninsula, has a rare petroglyph of the giant Comet, which caused the Catastrophe of c.2345 BC. It shows that the planet Earth passed through the tail of this Comet (or Comet Swarm) during two months, and that the whole Catastrophe lasted for four months. A precipitation of about seven meters of water during these days caused terrible floodings, in which about half of the people died. It happened at the start of the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt (c.2370-2189 BC), which leaded to the end of the Old Kingdom."

I am not disputing his extractions of these figures so much as I question his dating of the event, which seems to be the closest fit with the Geneological tables of the Old Testament for the Flood of Noah. As has been mentioned many, many times before, actual known history of that time refuses to admit any possibility of a worldwide floodduring the dynastic histories of Egypt and Mesopotamia. BUT the information makes sense as pertaining to the formation of the Carolina bays and the End of Atlantis.

This is the standing stone in querstion. de Jonge interprets the main central portion as a map of the North Atlantic featuring the landmass of Greenland prominently and the two circled areas to the right and left to represent Newfoundland and Brittany and the latitude drawn between them. He seems to say this because Greenland is the most prominent large island in the North Atlantic today. BUT taken as if the "Top" of the menhir points South, the landmass falls into the area indicated for Atlantis on the Kircher map (which has South at the top also: this was a standard feature for all of the antique maps which originated in Egypt, such as the famous example of the Idrisi map illustrated below)

Inverted plan of the menhir, which shows a secondary sketch-engraving for the Newfoundland-Brittany line now above the main map. The oblong Atlantis on this map is a little more schematic than Kircher's map but the tradition in European Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings is to show the Atlantic Islands as rectangular anyway. Thus it seems Kircher did not have to go to North Africa to see a stone prototype for his Atlantis map, there were copies brought to Europe from North Africa in the thousands of years before.

Now the next thing De Jonge says is that the shape denotes a comet plunging into the North Atlantic. That does start to sound like the theories of Muck and all the rest, and if this is so, the comet is depicted as a very broad sword hacking down on Atlantis from the North. That sounds as if it is describing the Clovis Comet as it can be told from the orientation of the Carolina bays. Muck says the largest part of the nucleus of this body impacted at the bottom of the North Atlantic, blew out the magma chambers under Atlantis, and sank it two or three kilometers vertically in a short period of time (as soon as the magma chambers could be emptied, in fact)

[Al-Idrisi's map drawn for King Roger of Sicily. The older maps were oriented with the South at top as a standard feature]

[An illustration of the Younger Dryas comet]

[This is an illustration of a comet that could well be called "A Sword in the sky"-such descriptions used to be common. I believe Muck says that the celestial body that sank Atlantis fell at the hour of local midnight. If that were the case, survivors on either side of the Atlantic witnessed some incredible fireworks that night as the comet fell ever closer to the earth and broke up into thousands of individual chunks of ice and stone formerly held together heterogenously by the comet's own slight gravity.]

Illustration showing Comets as swords, and a couple of Bronze-age Bronze swords for comparison to shape on the Monolith.

Donnelly's frontispiece for the book Ragnarok, or The Destruction of Atlantis. Donnelly thought this comet strike was well before the actual end of Atlantis, but other readers have combined the two incidents regularly. Donnelly thought the comet struck full across one side of the Earth and rained down innumerably rocky meteorite fragments in size from large boulders to fine dust. Undoubtedly the main part of the Ice-age deposit Donnelly was speaking of was terrestrial in origin and moved around by paroxyms of Earth, sea and Sky, but the matrix (loess) could be largely volcanic in origin, as Muck states (Older "Flood Geologists" had also said this separately, based on the chemical composition) So Perhaps Donnely's map DOES represent where the comet went down (approximately) and where the cometary dust remained in the Atmosphere until dispersed by winds.

This incident would probably not be the Ragnarok of Northern Mythology, BUT the legend of the Great Serpent Born of Fire [Loki] and imprisoned at the Bottom of the Sea where it coils around the world as the Midgardsormen (World-serpent) Iorgomundr, especial enemy of Thor, could well have been inspired by such events. That would account for the vast size of the Serpent and why it lies at the bottom of the Sea now, only to emerge at Doomsday (the REAL Ragnarok) From a Danish Petroglyph of the Bronze Age

Experts such as Napier and Clube have worked out charts showing how often large celestial bodies such as asteroids and comets should strike the Earth going by probabilities. The frequency of the strike turns out to be inversely proportionate to the size of the impacting body. It has been surmised that a body a kilometer across can be expected to strike the Earth every million years on the average.

Such a strike would impact releasing a force equivalent of 10,000 megatons of TNT.

Once again, every million years on average with more infrequent ones being larger and more powerful.

Napier and Clube are also supporters of the idea that there was an exceptionally large strike at the end of the Ice Ages associated with the extinction of the Megafauna at the time.

The Torino Scale is designed to gague the level of threat posed by impacting cosmic fragments. We are talking in the level of Top-of-the-Scale, Globally threatening events.

One of the evidences of the Clovis Comet is that there is a black carbonaceous layer at the Youngest Dryas which covers everything simultaneously, the Black Mats. Straight C14 dates are consistently between 10000 and 11000 years old, which is commonly adjusted upward to 10000 to 11000 BC by some experts. There are Black Mats in the East as well, not shown on this map. There is an excavation within half a mile of my house in Indianapolis with a large exposure of a Black Mat area.

There is also getting to be more evidence for meteor craters at the youngest Dryas dates around what was then a shrunken continental icecap (it swelled appreciably during the Younger Dryas itself): Three of them were recently identified along the St. Lawrence Seaway (Map at Left and Below)

[Corossol crater on the bottom of the sea near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River]

Map showing discovery of three more on-land craters, radiocarbon dated to the same level.

My sketch-map showing craters and Carolina Bays generally. Cape York Meteorites of this date from Northern Greenland. The large red are evidently indicates the main breakup point for the comet, above the area of the [later] Glacial Lake Agassiz. There is some suggestion of a large strike in Michigan at this time, but if so, the glaciers subsequently covered the area over and made the evidence much more ambiguous. More "Bays" are reported in South America: in Brazil and Venezuela, especially.

The morning began with a brief but vigorous argument - call it a discussion - in the hotel lobby.

The breakfast table was loaded with road maps, Google Earth printouts and colorful elevation images intended to help the three researchers locate a curious landscape feature. They were hunting for slight depressions in the earth, dimples almost invisible at ground level but so striking from the air that, for a number of years, they captivated the entire country.

Scientists in the mid-1900s devoted careers to their study, debated furiously in print, were celebrated, vilified, laughed at and honored, all in an attempt to explain what gouged out half a million shallow divots along the East Coast.

The subtle marks are called Carolina bays, a name so breathtakingly misleading that almost no one these days has heard of them. The bays are not connected to the sea or to rivers, so they are not really bays. Only a few hold water, and these look so much like ordinary lakes that some are, in fact, named Lake This or Lake That. They are not restricted to the Carolinas, but instead are found in great numbers from New Jersey to Georgia, with hundreds along the Eastern Shore and Virginia Beach.

Nobody knows what made them.

The three men gathered around the table at the Hampton Inn hoped to find out. But first, they had to find a Carolina bay.

The papers spread out on the table showed dozens of bays around northeast North Carolina, outlined in yellow on aerial photos.

Allen West, a geophysicist from Arizona, wanted to go to Rockyhock Bay, the largest one on the map, in search of soil samples to test a controversial theory. Malcolm LeCompte, a remote imaging specialist from Elizabeth City State University, also held out for Rockyhock. George Howard, a wetlands restorer from Raleigh, wanted to find a bay with a drainage ditch exposing soil layers for easier study and, since he was driving, they headed away from Rockyhock, toward County Line Road.

Because the bays are depressions, they tend to be wetlands. Indians called them pocosins. They came to be known as bay swamps because of the trees that grew there: sweet bay and loblolly bay and red bay. Then, because they were first noticed in North and South Carolina, they began to be called Carolina bays.

They are generally elliptical in shape, although those from Virginia north and Georgia south tend to be a little rounder. They are oriented in the same direction, roughly northwest although, again, there are caveats: the ones from Virginia north tend to point a little more to the west, while the southern ones tend to point a little more north.

They have white sand rims, thicker on the southeast edge, that stand anywhere from a few inches to several feet in height. Some bays overlap others and, where they do, the rim of the top bay is in place, and the bottom rim obliterated.

Bays are found by the hundreds on the Eastern Shore, by the tens in Currituck and Chowan counties in North Carolina, and a very few near Richmond. There may even be a few right outside Washington, D.C.

In North Carolina, Bladen County is half covered in bays; one researcher has counted 900 there. On elevation images made by lasers that can see through vegetation, bays appear that don't even show up on photos. The technology has caused some researchers to double the estimate of Carolina bays to close to a million.

"The Carolina bays are without doubt one of the most remarkable geomorphic features on the surface of the earth," wrote geologist Douglas Johnson in 1942. "They share with submarine canyons the distinction of being among the most difficult of earth forms to explain."

Many have tried.

The latest attempt is a controversial hypothesis that connects the Carolina bays to an ice age, a mass extinction and the disappearance of the Clovis people 12,900 years ago. Evidence is needed to support or refute the idea, and evidence is what the three researchers were after.

LeCompte navigated from a position that others might call back-seat driving, juggling paperwork and fruitlessly giving directions as Howard, deep in conversation with West, shot past highway exits and intersections. This bothered LeCompte, but West, who says his Ph.D. in philosophy helps make him laid-back in business, was unruffled.

Corralled at last by LeCompte into a left-hand turn onto the right highway, Howard headed the SUV down an arrow-straight road edging the southern end of the Great Dismal Swamp. On the horizon, not far away, the pavement curved abruptly skyward to cross a ridge. This was the Suffolk Scarp, a long ridge of prehistoric beach that once marked the edge of the sea.

"Cool!" Howard exclaimed. "So you really can see it."

Carolina bays run along the top and, largely, the western edges of both the Suffolk Scarp and the Currituck Scarp, a younger beach ridge that carries N.C. 168 from Chesapeake to the Outer Banks.

"We see a pattern in these bays," West said, and Howard, upholding the finest tradition of bay researchers, said, "I disagree."

At least 19 theories of bay formation have been offered over the past 161 years. Disagreements have not always been civil.

The first person to write about a bay, in late 1700, was merely complaining. Naturalist John Lawson wrote of "a prodigious wide and deep Swamp, being forc'd to strip stark-naked: and much a-do to save ourselves from drowning."

The second person to ponder the bays was a geologist who looked at South Carolina and decided, in 1847, that the lakes there must be fed by underground springs and that wind lapping the water had smoothed them into ellipses. His theory was promptly forgotten.

In 1895, the first bay article appeared in a professional journal. Writing in Science, L.C. Glenn proposed that the lakes in the Carolinas had formed when sea level dropped, leaving behind sandbars that held water in valleys. No one really cared.

Another author theorized in the Journal of Geology in 1931 that rock had dissolved under the bays, causing the land to sink, but interest was slight until Myrtle Beach Estates took advantage of a new technology called aerial photography to look at its land holdings in South Carolina. Shortly afterward, the federal Agriculture Department inventoried farmland from the air, and the results of the two surveys were amazing: Thousands and thousands of Carolina bays were revealed up and down the East Coast, all basically elliptical, all pointing northwest.

Everyone was surprised. Farmers had known about local bays because the soil was rich, if acidic, and many were drained for cropland before wetlands were protected by law in 1972. Foresters also knew their local bays because the depressions collected leaves and other organic matter that compressed, over centuries, into peat, and peat is a stubborn fuel that burns slowly, though with great persistence, as ground fires that last for months and even years.

But the photos showed so many. An engineer said they looked like craters on the moon, and the public imagination was fired.

Virginia has a long history in space science. In 1805, when asked about the radical new idea of meteorites, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "I do not say that it is impossible but as it is so much unlike any operation of nature we have ever seen, it requires testimony proportionately strong."

But that was hard to come by. In 1933, Frank A. Melton and William Schriever of the University of Oklahoma proposed that a shower of meteorites had created the Carolina bays, but they were unable to produce a single stone as evidence.

Their article kicked off 74 years of academic mudslinging, as scientists with opposing theories shot holes in each other's pet ideas. They fell roughly into two camps: extraterrestrial theorists, and those who said the bays were made by common earthly processes such as wind and water.

One writer proposed in 1933 that a comet had struck the East Coast, gouging out the bays. A geologist soon thereafter proposed that wind-created eddies in estuaries had done all the work. Others asked why, then, were the bays confined to the Atlantic Coast? Nobody had an answer.

In 1934, a new player emerged. William F. Prouty, geology department head at the University of North Carolina, said magnetic tests on the bays supported the meteorite theory. The same year, Douglas Johnson wrote an article titled "Supposed Meteorite Scars of South Carolina," launching a war of words that would go on between the two - the extraterrestrial supporter, and the wind-and-water man - for nearly 20 years.

Johnson said the depressions were sinkholes and the elliptical shape was formed by wind. Prouty responded with air pressure caused by passing meteors.

Johnson came back with a book titled "The Origin of the Carolina Bays," which began with approximately 100 pages trashing Prouty's ideas, then offered a complex theory of artesian springs making lakes that had beach ridges shaped by waves and dune ridges shaped by wind.

Chapman Grant put forth a theory that spawning fish, held in a northwest position by currents, had dug out the bays by fanning their tails on the sea floor. Since the largest Carolina bay is nearly 12 miles long, this would have required a lot of fish, and the theory failed to explain why the depressions would not have been destroyed by crashing surf as sea level dropped and exposed the bottom. The response, published by the same journal, was titled "On Grant's Fish Story."

One researcher proposed dust devils, another said melting icebergs, but the debate slowed considerably with Johnson's death in 1948. Prouty died before finishing his final article about the bays, but he still got the last word, as a publisher added an editor's note and ran it in 1952, three years after Prouty's death. In it, he proposed that a comet had struck the southeastern coast of the United States. As evidence, he had plotted on a map meteorites found across Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and other inland states. Still, no meteorites turned up in the bays themselves.

By the 1960s, terrestrial theorists had the upper hand, and attention turned to the biological diversity of the Carolina bays. Insect-eating plants such as the Venus flytrap were identified. Fish species that were found nowhere else were studied in Lake Waccamaw, a large bay near the southern edge of North Carolina.

In the 1970s, a researcher wrote that no evidence of a comet had turned up, either, and published his own wind-and-water theory, even going so far as to try to form a tiny Carolina bay in his lab.

A 1982 book revived the comet theory but placed the explosion well west of the bays, over the Ohio River Valley.

More recently, a librarian at the University of Georgia named Bob Kobres, who specializes in cataloging folk stories and legends of creation and catastrophe, added a giant beaver to the mix. Kobres says Ice Age beavers, which were roughly the size of today's black bears, could have created vast expanses of ponds and wetlands that exploded into steam when the comet arrived.

"From this reasoning it could be anticipated that a large 'footprint' impact event might leave the fish in a large deep lake relatively unscathed while it blasted boiled beavers out of their shallow ponds and into the beyond by means of a violent steam explosion," he wrote on his Web site.

That was the last word in bay theories until late 2007. And then a mammoth came into the picture.

The colorful elevation images of County Line Road were excitingly replete with Carolina bays - big ones, small ones, overlapping ones. The road even helpfully cut right through a few bays.

"It's a dramatic bay area," George Howard said. "In fact, I'd say it's one of the most dramatic."

Malcolm LeCompte, being more familiar with the area, cautioned, "That one that looks so prominent, it's just a flat field."

"Bay hunting is an exercise in the subtle," Howard agreed.

Howard, a Carolina bay enthusiast from Raleigh, and LeCompte, a remote imaging specialist from Elizabeth City State University, needed a bay. And they needed a bay they could dig in to look for minerals from outer space.

Howard turned the car left onto Folly Road.

The Delaware Indians told Thomas Jefferson that long before his time the mastodon rebelled against the people it was created to serve, and a great battle was fought west of the Alleghenies. The other animals fought against the mastodon, and the Great Spirit came down from the sky and sat on a mountain to watch. Nearly all the animals were killed before the mastodon escaped, and swamps formed where their blood fell. Their bones, the Indians said, could be found there still.

So when Jefferson dispatched the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the West in 1804, he asked them to also, please, keep an eye out for living woolly mammoths and mastodons.

Dwarf mammoths did, in fact, survive on an island off California for about 7,000 years after their enormous mainland cousins went extinct, but Jefferson received only bones from Lewis and Clark. Something had killed the giant animals of the last Ice Age, basically all at once.

In 2007, geophysicist Allen West and his colleagues suggested that the mammoth killer, in a maelstrom of fire and wind, may also have created the Carolina bays.

West is a calm man, so completely calm - philosophical, one might say, knowing his background - that the pursuit of catastrophe seems an ill fit. Yet the mystery of mass extinctions has drawn him since his childhood in Florida, where he learned that the arrowheads he picked up from the ground were used by prehistoric hunters to kill mammoths and mastodons.

"It struck me as a kid," he says, "that it seemed awfully odd, why would they go extinct after they'd been around for so long?"

He didn't pursue it. Instead, finding that a doctorate in philosophy didn't open many business opportunities, he went into geophysics, eventually forming a corporation that drilled for oil and gas. Now he is a consultant in Arizona, helping find oil, gas, groundwater and precious metals. He even located a lost Spanish mining tunnel for a client, or he thinks he did - it was very secret.

After retirement, he decided to write a book about mass extinctions. His research led him, ultimately, to the Carolina bays.

Ice ages come and go in regular cycles, each lasting about 100,000 years, and separated by shorter warm spells about 10,000 years long. But last go-around, as the Pleistocene ice age was starting to warm up, the Earth plunged back into cold conditions. Temperatures dropped about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, glaciers rebuilt, and 35 kinds of animals - not 35 species, but 35 groups of similar species - went extinct, just like that.

Never before had so many different animals disappeared in so short a time. The cold lasted for about 1,000 years, and then the planet abruptly warmed again.

This sudden cold spell is called the Younger Dryas. It marks the end of the Clovis culture, a people who had developed the repeating rifle of their day - a distinctive stone spear point on a reloadable shaft - for hunting mammoths and other huge creatures: giant ground sloths (similar to anteaters) that stood 10 feet tall, primitive horses, mastodons, short-faced cave bears larger than grizzlies, sab er-toothed cats and American camels.

Three theories have been proposed to explain the Younger Dryas extinction, known by their shorthand names of chill, ill and overkill. Proponents of the climate change theory say the drop in temperature, with its associated changes in habitat and food supply, snuffed the animals. Critics say the animals had survived previous ice ages just fine.

Pandemic illness has also been suggested, but there is little evidence of that.

The third theory is that Clovis humans, with their new and improved weapons, slaughtered the large animals to extinction, but critics say mice, hyenas, wolves, vultures and other small creatures also disappeared, and it is unlikely that they were overhunted.

In 2007, 26 scientists from three nations, including West and Howard, proposed a fourth theory to explain not only the mass extinction but the Younger Dryas itself: A comet exploding over or on the Laurentide ice sheet that covered most of Canada and the Great Lakes.

"If you see white sand, we're passing a bay," LeCompte said from the back seat of the SUV. "I think that's a bay right there."

"Is it?" Howard asked doubtfully and kept going.

"Sure looks like we're coming over a rim here," West said.

Howard took a wrong turn, backtracked, turned again and stopped in the middle of a deserted road. The three exchanged maps and printouts.

"That was a cluster of bays we crossed," West said.

Everybody looked. Nobody saw anything. That is the big problem with Carolina bays. From the air, bays stand out like dimples on a golf ball, their white sand rims highlighting each oval. But from ground level, they are nearly impossible to see.

West has tried to find Carolina bays using GPS, and even then he has driven right past them. The three discussed downloading GPS coordinates on top of the Google Earth images where craters had been marked, and Howard tried to do that on his laptop while driving.

He finally pulled over by a sign that read "Sand Hill Farm" and let West take the wheel.

"Let's go to Rockyhock," West said.

The lead authors on the paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are West and physicist Rick Firestone of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California. The paper presents evidence that a comet may have wreaked havoc on Earth 12,900 years ago, at the start of the Younger Dryas. It is a refinement of West's book, published in 2006, when he, Firestone and a third author, in "The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes," proposed that a supernova could have set off a series of events culminating in a fragmented comet landing on the ice sheet or exploding over it.

"We believe what happened is that a large comet impacted the Earth near the Great Lakes, and that impact was sufficient to kill many of the mammoths outright," Firestone said in a phone interview. "The shock wave, a mega-hurricane of winds across the breadth of North America, actually caused much of the extinction. We believe the winds also formed the Carolina bays."

The theory covers a lot of ground: The blast melted the ice sheet, which sent floods of fresh water into the sea, which altered ocean currents, which caused the temperature to drop, which caused the Younger Dryas. In more detail, this is what the theory says happened:

Comets are loose conglomerates of ice and dust and bits of cosmic leftovers, sort of like poorly packed meatballs. Meteorites and asteroids, on the other hand, are made of iron and rock. A comet would not necessarily leave a crater, especially not if it landed on an ice sheet several miles thick. But it would, like a meatball dropped into sauce, create quite a splatter.

The splat threw icy slush, dirt and radiation for hundreds of miles. Wildfires sparked by the extreme heat burned forest and grassland alike. Dust darkened sunlight and created rain clouds, which could have drizzled or poured for months, until the air cleared.

The impact or airburst would have melted ice, flooding the glacial lakes that already lay at the toe of the ice sheets. They would have burst their ice dams and roared away in all directions, ultimately pouring so much fresh water into the North Atlantic that the warm Gulf Stream was shorted out, a scenario portrayed in the 2004 movie "The Day After Tomorrow."

The authors say ancient stories from around the world tell of catastrophe. They share themes of something falling from the sky, of the world drowning in rain, of fires and floods and destruction. In many of them, the animals die and only a few humans - those who heeded warnings and obeyed heavenly commands - are spared.

LeCompte says scientists don't give much heed to Native American teaching stories, which he calls "white man's chauvinism." He's used to skepticism, having declared at the age of 4 or 5 that he wanted to be an astronaut, in the days before the job even existed. He ended up as a naval flight officer with a Ph.D. in planetary astrophysics.

He still remembers the sci-fi heroes who fueled his dreams - Tom Corbett, Space Cadet; Commander Corey and the Space Patrol; Rocky Jones, Space Ranger; and Captain Video - and he believes that the Indian legends are based on something just as amazing, but true. The Mattamuskeet of North Carolina call themselves "children of the falling star" for a reason, he says.

In "Cycle," the authors tell a Lakota story, about humans and giant animals becoming so evil that the Creator sent his Thunderbirds to fight them. They threw down thunderbolts from the sky that shook the world, setting forests and prairies on fire with flames that leaped to the sky. Lakes boiled and dried up, rocks glowed and the giant animals burned up.

Then the Creator sent rain to flood the Earth and cleanse it. After the floods subsided, the few people who survived found the bones of the giant animals buried in rock and mud.

Some researchers say the bays are 100,000 years old; others say 10,000 to 13,000. Still others say different bays formed at different times over millions of years; however, they cannot explain why Carolina bays are not still forming today.

In 1975, Rockyhock Bay was reported by D.R. Whitehead to be 35,000 years old, based on core samples, which are long tubes of rock and soil with the youngest layers at the top and oldest at the bottom. Another scientist, working on another bay, had reported finding ancient river channels and other old sediments underneath his bay. West thought it was possible that Whitehead had cored too deeply and had analyzed samples that actually came from underneath Rockyhock Bay, not from the bay itself.

If he could show that the 35,000-year-old layer reported by Whitehead extended beyond the edges of the bay, it would support the idea that the bays are younger, perhaps only 12,900 years old.[In readjusted-radiocarbon years. The flat radiocarbon date would be between 11000 and 10000 years old and many scientists do not use the readjustment-DD]

Rockyhock Bay was pretty obvious, even from the road. It was a dense cluster of tall trees and short shrubs, a dark green oasis in a flat plain, encircled by an unpaved road. It was also enclosed by a tall chain-link fence.

"That does not deter me," George Howard said, but forays up farm roads dead-ended long before the bay was in reach. Abandoning the SUV, the three researchers struck out through a melon field that sloped gently up from the fence.

"I wonder if that's not the rim right there," Malcolm LeCompte mused. "That's the white sand."

Allen West knelt and began to fill a plastic bag.

Howard has never been deterred by much. An overwhelming personality, he has a business, a family, a mammoth tusk over the plasma TV, an unmatched ability to find things online and a deep interest in Carolina bays, which he heard of while working in environmental affairs for Congress. His boss at the time was a North Carolina senator, who had a topographical map.

"I saw these odd-looking ellipses on it," Howard recalls, "and I said, 'What in the world are those, senator?' and he said, 'Oh, meteor holes.' "

An avocation was launched. Now Howard co-owns a wetlands restoration business, whose first job was restoring a series of drained Carolina bays. In his spare time, he and a friend dig and mail soil samples from the bays to West, a geophysicist who lives in Arizona.

West analyzes them for diamonds.

Across North America and in at least two European countries, the start of the Younger Dryas cold spell is marked in the soil by a layer called a black mat, although it may also be white or bluish in color. The mat is topped by a layer of sediment holding few or no human artifacts, indicating a lack of occupation for many years after it was deposited.

Clovis artifacts and Pleistocene bones are found directly below the black mat, never above it.

Fourteen kinds of minerals, gases and other materials have been found in the black mat, and in every Carolina bay tested, more than a dozen so far. They are extraterrestrial markers, and they have been found at all of the Clovis sites studied by the team, at the point in time when that culture basically vanished.

The markers include charcoal and heavy metals, plus the element iridium. Iridium found in a worldwide soot layer deposited 65 million years ago was key to linking dinosaur extinctions to the Chicxulub impact crater under the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.

Other markers found in the Carolina bays include spiky glasslike pieces of carbon; fullerenes, which are round objects that resemble soccer balls because of their six-sided pattern; helium-3, an isotope not found naturally on this planet; and hollow balls of carbon.

The clincher, as far as West is concerned, is nanodiamonds, so named for a good reason - 10,000 would fit across the width of a human hair.

"What we have found is, several big Carolina bays are lined with diamonds," he said. "This is the first time extraterrestrial materials have been found lining the bays."

West has found diamonds inside the carbon spherules and trapped in the glasslike carbon. He says that suggests, but does not yet prove, that an extraterrestrial impact created the bays.

"Even though the diamonds are the strongest of those 14 markers, it's the collective weight of all 14 of them that's important," West said. "It's very difficult to argue that all 14 of them, in the same layer across two continents, is accidental. It wasn't accidental when the dinosaurs went extinct, and it's not accidental now, we think."

Diamonds found in the bays and at Clovis archaeological sites across the country are rounded and strangely shaped because they were created within seconds, unlike slow-forming diamonds in the ground. There is, West said, no way to explain it other than an impact. Such diamonds have been found in one other location on Earth: in an oil field surrounding the Chicxulub crater.

He finished filling the plastic bag with sand. If lab tests reveal carbon spherules, they will be examined for nanodiamonds.

"A single carbon spherule is about the size of a period at the end of a sentence," he said. "And in that, there may be as many as a billion diamonds."

He strode back to the SUV through sand hot enough to burn skin.

"I can't tell you how long I've had this dream to come to Rockyhock Bay," West said.

"Right up there with the pyramids," Howard said.

"Actually, I like this better than the pyramids."

"About the same temperature," Howard replied, and drove out of the field.

Critics of the impact theory say the 14 markers rain down on Earth all the time as dust from outer space. West says the markers in the black mat and in the Carolina bays are many times more abundant than those normal background levels. Such high levels are found only in association with cosmic impacts, he said, but not everyone is convinced.

As further evidence for the impact theory, the group cites the work of other scientists. Some have reported finding Clovis tools and mammoth tusks gouged on just one side by radioactive grains of dust, all dug in from the direction of the Great Lakes. Others have concluded that floods up to 1,000 feet deep roared across the Northwest states. Still others have studied the loss of ocean circulation and found Hudson Bay sediments off Africa and Europe, carried there, they think, by icebergs flushed into the southern seas by the influx of fresh water from the melted ice sheet.

West and his colleagues presented their impact hypothesis at the American Geophysical Union meeting in October 2007. (An entire morning of the meeting was devoted to papers, pro and con, about it.) Shortly thereafter, hearkening back to the great debates of the mid-1900s, the journal Science published the first criticism of it.

In May, the Geological Society of America published another paper that called the evidence "a Frankenstein monster, incompatible with any single impactor or any known impact event." The rebuttal from Firestone and West, published in the same issue, concludes: "The truth may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true."

In June, a rebuttal to the rebuttal, published online, warns against "a few markers collected in good faith from an abundant background, combined with a good story and some wishful thinking."

A paper about the diamonds has been submitted to two major international journals. West hopes it will be out soon.

In 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was on a collision course with Jupiter. As it plunged toward the planet, the comet broke apart until there were at least 20 pieces. One by one, they disappeared into the gaseous planet. Huge scars began to appear like open wounds, and the marks remained visible to telescopes on Earth for many months.

Critics say impacts are so infrequent that the Younger Dryas must have been caused by something else. They say there is no visible crater near the Great Lakes. Supporters point to Shoemaker-Levy 9, and to the fact that impact craters on Earth have been recognized for only a few decades, and may be more plentiful than anyone knows. Since 1960, 174 have been listed in the Earth Impact Database.

Over dinner in Kitty Hawk one June evening, LeCompte and West discussed the Tunguska event of 1908. From miles away, witnesses reported a brilliant flash and huge explosions over a remote region of Siberia. Twenty years later, when researchers finally reached the site, they found 772 square miles of dead trees splayed in a radial pattern, and elliptical-shaped bogs aligned with the center.

Today, it is widely accepted that a piece of a comet or a small meteor exploded. There is no visible crater. Less well-known is a suspected impact on Aug. 13, 1930, in remote Brazil near the Peruvian border. A monk arriving five days later reported that native Indians said three fiery balls from space had exploded, obscuring the sun with dust and setting fires that were still burning. Researchers have pointed out that the event occurred during the annual Perseid meteor shower, which is caused by debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle.

LeCompte, a remote imaging specialist from Elizabeth City State University, says the danger to Earth from comet debris and other small cosmic objects seems to be greater than officially calculated.

"These things still remain a threat, and that threat is not well known," he says. "It's a very political issue. So this whole thing about the Younger Dryas impact is going right in the face of that whole issue because it suggests that the impacts are more frequent than the models might suggest."

The Algonquin Indians tell a story they say is the oldest of their people. In it, the Great Spirit warned that a star would fall, and the people who listened hid themselves in deep mud. An object appeared in the sky, as bright as a second sun, with a long, glowing tail that enveloped the Earth. Trees burned, lakes and rivers boiled, rocks shattered.

After the star had climbed back into the sky, the people emerged to find their world completely changed. The giant animals had died, leaving only their bones behind. The Great Spirit warned that the Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star would someday return.

"In this story, this long-tailed bright object, which sounds a whole lot like a comet, the tail was responsible for killing giant animals," West said. "They actually have those in the story, giant animals. It killed many of the people; they say it was so hot it caused the ice to melt off the mountains, it caused rocks to melt, and it caused all the trees to catch on fire."

Then there is the predictive part of the story, he said: "If our orbit, and the orbit of this object that we think hit us coincided once, then the odds are extremely high that it would coincide again. There are astronomers that have looked at the orbits of some of these heavily fragmented comets, and Earth crosses several of them every year."

"So it certainly is conceivable that some of the shooting stars that we see today are remnants of the object that we think hit us 12,900 years ago," West said.

"You look up in the sky, you see those old fireflies coming in, well, multiply them by a thousand times and that's possibly what the Clovis people would have seen."

If lines are drawn along the long axes of the Carolina bays, then extended several hundred miles, they converge at two spots: one near the Great Lakes, and one in southern Canada. This holds true for the bays that are north of Virginia, because they point a little more westerly, and the bays that are south of South Carolina, because they point a little more to the north.

West sketched out the location of the Carolina bays along the East Coast, their long axes aligned toward the Great Lakes.

Then he added the "rainwater basins" of Nebraska, Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma, which are baylike depressions oriented toward the northeast, with the long axes pointing to the same spot near the Great Lakes. The two areas fan out like butterfly wings on either side of the central point.

It is the same shape made by impact spatters on the moon and Mars, when material is flung out of a forming crater, West said.

"The implications of this research are that this is a type of impact that was unknown before," West said, "and is very much like the impact when Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter. No one knew that could happen, either. So it appears that these kinds of things, because they leave so little evidence, that they are quite likely far more frequent than space scientists have known in the past.

"That poses substantial danger for the culture. If these things even happen every 50,000 years or 100,000 years, then at some point in the future one of them's going to happen, and then it's going to seriously disrupt our civilization.

"This is one thing - unlike al-Qaida, unlike the bird flu, unlike probably global warming - that has the potential to end our species. Any enlightened civilization cannot let these things hit it. We need to do something about it."

Back on the highway, Howard turned again onto Sandy Ridge Road.

"There's a sandy ridge there, all right," West observed, consulting a map of the Carolina bays. "The rim runs right under that house."

He pondered a cornfield that filled another bay. The white sand rim dipped into dark soil at the

center of the field, then rose at the end of the row into white sand again. West wished for a sample to test.

"If we're going to prove this hypothetical comet, it's incumbent on us to find the evidence," he said. The small plastic bags that might hold it were sitting in the back seat.

The afternoon sun blazed. Smoke smudged the air, drifting from a peat fire to the south that was burning between two Carolina bay lakes. As the highway rolled by, West pointed out signs for Two Mile Desert Road and Great Desert Road. Not really desert, said the Arizona resident.

"Desert means pocosin," Howard explained, "because it's monotonous."

"One man's monotony is another man's Carolina bay," West replied, and the road dipped, just a little, to cross another one.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Prehistoric rock carving. Presently located near skiing village of Oukaimeden, Atlas Mountains, near Marrakech, Morocco.

The shape of the cental mass indicated on the Morrocan rock-art is similar to the island of Atlantis as depicted on Father Kircher's map of Atlantis but it was engraved on the rock over 10000 years ago in the Hunter period or Bubalus phase of Saharan Rock Art. To explain why that date, we shall have to make a longer discussion of Saharan Rock Art later. But just to describe the shape, it also has a larger North half with a bight on the Eastern shore and an indication of what could be meant for the Rectangualar Great Plain of Atlantis and the main city incorrectly at the center (it should be neaer to the shore by the preserved description.) There are some areas which might be indicating other large islands to the West, and then two sets of concentric circles on either side of the circle-map. Concentric circles are commonly cepicted in the Atlas mountains (which also contains a number of megalithic circles, standing stones, burial mounds, Rough-stone-walled processional ways and sunken ceremonial centers, and other Megalithis structures) There is even some evidence of settlements that used the concentric wall-and-moat settlement pattterns like the Celtic Hill Forts, Germandic Burghs and Iberian Castros (Castles)-which at one time seem to have been the predominant plan for settlements. The circular walled settlements even persist into the Viking Age.
Nor is it even so very rare for maps to be alleged in rock art-schematic maps for North and South America have been alleged by such people as Barry Fell, in different places, and if this is true then the Egyptians at the beginning of their history might have access to stone maps to put together and make into the Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. Some of these maps are supposed to be associated with star-charts that indicate a prehistoric date. That may not be true the way it was stated, but there is no doubt that the rock art does encode Astronomical references: so does some CroMagnon cave art. The Astronomical references extend into the North African Tifnaig script, because some of the letters in it are actually constellations and the letters have an Astronomical reference. And clever enough astronomers could fix dates represented in stone-age art if the star positions were shown accurately enough. There are some statements preserved by historians such as Herodotus that repeat that the Egyptions had records extending back 30,000 years and that they knew of the positions of celestial bodies through a whole Precession of the equinoxes cycle and a half another one before that: incredibly as that might sound, Marshak hypothesizes that CroMagnons began making Astronomical observations and marking them down by 30000 years ago. So it is entirely possible that the Egyptians were not joking and meant what they said, if they knew of accurate enough rock art and could read the dates on them correctly. Furthermore, some experts put the origins of rock art in Africa back to 25000 BC (27000 years ago), not that big of a difference.

[Click for larger size]

There are some key chronological issues with the standard version of Saharan Rock-art chronology as it is usually stated in the reference books. The first and most troublesome is that the first and most basic period is named the "Bubalus" period owing to the prominence of a type of buffalo depicted on the rock art. This is one of the more persistent and asinine of all mistakes made in standard references. Bubalus is the genus of the Asiatic water buffalo and is not even an African animal at all: the African buffalo is no relation to the Asiatic water buffalo (and that is a very good reason not to complain when somebody calls an American bison a buffalo: the name buffalo is non-specific and does not mean any one thing in particular) The animal depicted is one excavated at Oluvai gorge by LSB Leakey and it died out at the end of the Pleistocene, over 10000 years ago (and not 5000 BC as the chart mistakenly states) Before the end of the Pleistocene, the Saharan rock-artists were in the Roundheaded period and were already herding cattle, goats and sheep, although they were not so important as they would be later, and making pottery. And they were well sophisticated enough to later give rise to the dynastic Egyptians:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1997350/posts

The Tassili n’Ajjer of Southern Algiers is described as the “largest storehouse of rock paintings in the world”. But could it also be the origins of the ancient Egypt culture ?
In January 2003, I made enquiries to visit the Hoggar Mountains and the Tassili n’Ajjer, one of the most enchanting mountain ranges on this planet. The two geographically close but nevertheless quite separate landscapes are located in the Sahara desert in southeast Algeria. I was told that if I could pack my bags immediately (literally), I could join the three weeks’ trip. Unfortunately, I could not, but planned to go on the January 2004 trek.

A few weeks later, Dutch and German tourists were kidnapped in the area (though the English group I would have joined had no such problems). Some of the tourists were held for several months, before German and Dutch troops were sent in to free the hostages from their rebel captors. The kidnappings have since stopped most if not all tourists from travelling towards the magical rock paintings of the Tassili, as insurance brokers are unwilling to provide cover. At a time when the world was beginning to wake up to the magical reality of the Tassili paintings, international political tension has placed the prehistoric rock paintings off-limits.

Despite the fact that the rock paintings of the Tassili can be visited, the few people who have written about these rock paintings in popular accounts have largely relied on the pioneering work of Henri Lhote and his team.

Lhote stated that the Tassilli was the richest storehouse of prehistoric art in the whole world. He wrote a series of books, the best known of which is “The Search for the Tassili Frescoes. The Rock paintings of the Sahara.” It is a popular account of the hardships he encountered in trying to discover and make drawings of the rock paintings that were scattered on the rock faces in the various corners of the Tassili. Lhote himself built on the work of Lieutenant Brenans, who was one of the first to venture deep into the canyons of the Tassili during a police operation in the 1930s. As the first European to enter that area, he noticed strange figures that were drawn on the cliffs. He saw elephants walking along with their trunks raised, rhinoceros with ugly looking horns on their snouts, giraffes with necks stretched out as if they were eating at the tops of the bushes. Today, the area is a desolate desert. What these paintings depicted was an era long gone, when the Sahara was a fertile savannah, teeming with wildlife… and humans.
Lhote spoke to Brenans after the war ; in co-operation with Lhote’s mentor Abbé Breuil, who had researched several of the Paleolithic cave paintings in Southern France, a mission to map and study the rock paintings of the Tassili was organised.

The conditions of the Tassili are very otherworldly. One could argue it is an otherworldy landscape. Some have actually described it as a “lunar landscape”.

Otherworldly is also a fitting description of the paintings. Lhote himself described some of them as “Martian faces”. Lhote used the term as they resembled the alien faces that he had seen on television sci-fi documentaries. And the term would later be used by the likes of Erich von Däniken to speculate whether some of the figures were indeed depictions of extraterrestrial visitors.

The “Martians” were what Lhote more scientifically had labelled “round-headed people”, though they do indeed look otherwordly. And that is what Terence McKenna believed that they were : otherworldly, not in the sense of extraterrestrial, but in the sense of another dimension. In his opinion, some of the rock art showed evidence of a lost religion that was based on the hallucinogenic mushroom. He saw figures that were sprouting mushrooms all over their bodies, like at Matalen-Amazar and Ti-n-Tazarift. Others were holding them in their hands, and still other figures were hybrids of mushrooms and humans. He noted that there was one depiction of a shaman in antler headgear with a bee’s face, clutching mushrooms and noted that these were the earliest known depictions of shamans with large numbers of grazing cattle. The fact that these were shamans was supported by the presence of masks, an instrument often worn by shamans during religious ceremonies. If anyone still was not convinced that these people went “out of their minds” to paint these scenes, McKenna noted the geometric structures that surrounded the shamans, which for McKenna and other specialists was evidence of the trance state that the painters had entered for painting.

Though McKenna popularised the paintings, what he wrote was largely in line with what Lhote had pondered himself. He was convinced that this art was inspired by magic and that it stemmed from religious beliefs. He also made comparison to the artists who painted inside the French caves, whereby studies published decades after Lhote’s death, such as those by David Lewis-Williams, have highlighted their shamanic context.

Other researchers, notably Wim Zitman, have identified an astronomic connotation to the various figures. He specifically focuses his attention on the so-called “swimmer”, depicted at Ti-n-Tazarift, and argues that this is in fact the depiction of a constellation. He also argues for a connection between the rock paintings of the Tassili and the origin of the Egyptian civilisation, wondering whether the shamans of the Tassili might not have been the “Followers of Horus” that have been the subject of so much speculation in the past decade by the likes of Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock. Rather than from the mythical Atlantis, might they have come from a region southeast of the Atlas mountains, i.e. the Tassili ?

Lhote himself identified an Egyptian dimension, though he was at pains to draw a clear outline how Egypt would slot into the Tassili rock paintings.

He published in his book two paintings which had an unmistakable ancient Egyptian character. Furthermore, they were “out of place art” and did not fit in with the other paintings that he had found. His discovery caused commotion in scholarly circles, as it seemed irrefutable proof of contact between the Tassili and Ancient Egypt. The question was how. Eventually, it emerged that the paintings were done by one member of Lhote’s team, who played a successful prank on Lhote. The pictures were reproduced up to the early 1970s in editions of his book, before being removed from successive reprints. Today, the paintings have been discretely erased from Jabbaren and Aurenghet, and the Touareg guides shake their head if the photos are shown, having never seen them. Of course, some will argue that this is part of an archaeological cover-up, whereby one member of his team was forced to lie, whereby the establishment later removed the paintings from the cliffs to remove this “Egyptian connection”.

“If at one stage Egyptian (and maybe also Mycenaean) influence can be observed, the most archaic of the Tassili pictures belong to a school unknown up to now and one that apparently was of local origin”, Lhote concluded. There were largely two forms of rock paintings, distinguishable by the location in which they were found. Some were found in rock shelters, such as at Aouanrhet. These sites were where the shaman performed his divination, as the face of a rock was often seen as a doorway to another dimension (another parallel with the paintings in the French caves). Though one could interpret their location as the work of a nomadic people, Lhote’s team also found several urban settlements. He found small concentrations of human activity around Tan-Zoumiatak in the Tin Abou Teka massif. It was a little rocky citadel that dominated the gorge below. The citadel was cut through with a number of narrow alleys. Lhote described the art he found here as : “There were life-size figures painted in red ochre, archers with muscular arms and legs, enormous ‘cats’, many scenes with cattle, war-chariots and so forth. Up to this time I had never seen figures of this sort in the Tassili and the mass of paintings that I managed to view that day quite put into the shade all those I had seen up to then.”

It was a highlight so far, but more impressive sites were to follow. At Jabbaren, he found a city with alleys, cross-roads and squares. The walls were covered with hundreds of paintings. Jabbaren is a Tuareg word meaning “giants” and the name refers to the paintings found inside the city, some of which depict human figures that are indeed gigantic in size. One of them measured up to eighteen feet high. Several of these paintings depicted “Martians” and for Lhote, it was the first time he discovered paintings of hundreds of oxen. Jabbaren was soon labelled one of the oldest sites of the Tassili. Ti-n-Tazarift was another city.

Its centre was marked by a huge amphitheatre with a diameter of more than five hundred yards. It had an immense public square with houses grouped around it. Given off from it were avenues, streets, passages and even blind alleys. The city stretched for a mile and a quarter. It were once again the hollows at the base of the rocks that revealed a variety and multitude of paintings, including more paintings of “Martians”, or round-headed people.

The true highlight, however, was Sefar. Little is written about the city. Lhote does not provide many details, except a map, showing its extent, as well as the presence of several streets and avenues, tumuli, tombs and something that he calls the “esplanade of the Great Fishing God”. Lhote named the character as he seemed to be carrying fish. But a closer inspection of the photograph that successive expeditions have taken, suggests what Zitman had always felt could be the truth : rather than a “fishing god”, was this character not depicted in a pose that the ancient Egyptians knew as “smiting the enemy” ? It was a pose that was used by the Pharaohs to display their mastery over the forces of chaos.

The “Great Fishing God” of Sefar is thus potential evidence that there is indeed a link between Egypt and the Tassili. Some of the rock paintings also show boats, such as at Sefar and Aouanrhet. These depictions are very similar if not identical to what was discovered by the likes of Toby Wilkinson in similar sites and similar rock paintings in the region between the Nile and the Red Sea. He dated these paintings to the 5th millennium BC, which overlaps with the paintings of the Tassili. Like the Tassili, the desert area where Wilkinson uncovered these paintings was then verdant grassland. Like the Tassili, these Egyptian paintings are a complex mixture of motifs, depicting crocodiles, hippos and boats from the Nile alongside ostriches and giraffes from the savannah, and suffused with cattle imagery and the religious symbolism that would characterize classical Egyptian art. This should by now sound familiar…

For Wilkinson, these rock paintings show that pre-Pharaonic Egyptians were not settled flood-plain farmers, but semi-nomadic herders who drove their cattle in between the lush riverbanks and the drier grasslands. He also identified that several of these paintings were located around ancient trade routes. For a “semi-nomadic people”, it is by no means a long stretch of the imagination to argue that they trekked throughout the savannah, from east to west and backwards. And thus, in Pre-dynastic Egypt, Egypt and the Tassili were more than likely “one”. So there is an Egyptian connection, but rather than arguing for a connection around 1200 BC, based on the fake paintings Lhote fell for, the connection can actually be found in predynastic Egypt.

Though the Tassili paintings are by far the best known, they are not the only area where such paintings can be found. Nearby areas such as Acacus and Messak have revealed similar rock paintings. It confirms that the Tassili was not an isolated incident, but part of a larger whole. Both Wilkinson and Zitman argue for a radical reinterpretation of the origins of ancient Egypt. For Wilkinson, the rock paintings in southern Egypt provide proof that it is there that we should look for the “Genesis of the Pharaohs” (the title of his book).

For Zitman, the origin of ancient Egypt can be found in a culture and area that stretches into the Tassili, where there is the pose painted on a cliff face in Sefar that would later adorn the front walls of several Egyptian temples. And that cannot be a coincidence. Furthermore, it also coincides with what Lhote wrote : “The most common profile suggested that of Ethiopians, and it was almost certainly from the east that these great waves of pastoralist immigrants came who invaded not only the Tassili but much of the Sahara.”

The Tassili has thus added a new chapter to African history – but it is a new chapter at the beginning of the book. It is the history of what is known as the “Neolithic wet period”, which lasted from 9000 to 2500 BC, when much of the Sahara was habitable for humans, when the dunes were covered with grassland, supporting hippos, lions, crocodiles, zebras, giraffes, etc. By 7000 BC, there were hunters, dancers, bakers and even sailors. There were shamans, leaving rock paintings on the cliff faces. The earliest examples of Saharan rock art are invariably engravings, sometimes on a very large scale, representing the ancient and partially extinct wildlife. That they were at this time nomadic hunters is inferred from a lack of representations of domestic animals.

One of the most prominent and common representations is the Bubalus Antiqus, the ancestor of modern domesticated cattle, resembling the modern east African buffalo, but with much larger horns. As it became extinct around 5000 BC, it has allowed archaeologists to date the Tassili rock paintings.

Lhote then identified the “round headed people” as the next phase. This peculiar style is officially limited to the Tassili, but there are similarities with the large cave at Wadi Sora in the Gilf Kebir and paintings in the Ennedi, showing that these people got very close to Egypt.

Sir Wallis-Budge was amongst the first to identify that the ancient Egyptians were inheritors of the African shamanic tradition. Wilkinson agrees ; McKenna too. There was a religion in the Tassili, apparently involving hallucinogenic substances that opened up gateways into other dimensions for the shamans. The outcome must have been a religious doctrine, one that began to be written down on the cliff faces, including the “Great fishing god”, which by 3500 BC became incorporated in Dynastic Egypt as the symbol of Pharaonic control and which would throughout Egypt’s history be depicted on its great temple walls.

But when ancient Egypt went Dynastic, the Tassili did not follow the trend. The rock faces continued to be used for paintings, though became different in style. By 2500 BC, the savannah began to transform into the desert it is now. When the horse was introduced to the Sahara about 1200 BC, enabling horse drawn chariots to be used along the Saharan trade routes up until classical times, these animals too became incorporated in the art of the local people. But by 1200 BC, the climate had become vastly different from the savannah of 7000 BC. The difference in climate between today and 7000 BC could indeed be seen as being of a different world.

Today, the Tassili could indeed be on a different planet. Though its artwork is more and more photographed, few if any are willing to incorporate it within a larger framework. Von Däniken was wrong when he stated that these were extra-terrestrial beings, but he was right to suggest that the Tassili had an unknown dimension to the history of ancient Egypt. Making a step into the Tassili will be harder than making a small step on the Moon, it would not be big step for Mankind, but it would be big step for archaeology.

[Comment]
In reading this fascinating article I was reminded of something I saw two years ago in “General History of Africa; II Ancient Civilizations of Africa,” G. Mokhtar, Ed., UNESCO, 1990. I will now quote from it.

“Linguistic Affinity: Wolof, a Senegalese language spoken in the extreme west of Africa on the Atlantic Ocean, is perhaps as close to Ancient Egyptian as Coptic. An exhaustive study of this question has recently been carried out. In this chapter enough is presented to show that the kinship between Ancient Egyptian and the languages of Africa is not hypothetical but a demonstrable fact which it is impossible for modern scholarhip to thrust aside.” Then some examples from an extended list.

The chapter further hypothesizes that through the comparative study of African languages, much more could be learned about the ancient Egyptian language.

The Egyptian Old Kingdom did not begin until around 3,000 BC, and it is quite likely that the Nile River culture developed as the savannas of the Sharah became desert, and the Nile the main reliable water source.

7 posted on Sunday, April 06, 2008 4:04:40 PM by gleeaikin

I should mention that besides the ProtoEgyptian influence of the Saharan rockart, there does remain a certain affinity for Mykenian and Minoan art styles later on: and some experts also feel that the purely late-Paleolithic rock-art tradition of the Sahara is represented in Palestine and the Middle-East, where the influence of the culture and art styles diffused, even reaching as far as Central Asia.

But as for the rock-art piece which started this article, only time will tell. Perhaps the experts will find the resemblence to be stretching a coincidence too far. For my part, it seems a most sensible and practical way for advanced but extinct cultures to convey specific information (such as the story of Atlantis as well?) over the ages to later scholars who are smart enough to have figured out the key to the code.

And I had intended to add the following reply, but it did not go through owing to technical errors at Blogger. Never mind, we have been that route before and I know the alternative route. Here is my reply posted as a new blog entry:

That site includes the following scriptual data:

"Appearances of the giants in the Bible

I bring forth more Bible passages that speak about the giants..

Ishbibenob the descendant of the giant

2 Sam 21:
15 And the Philistines had war again with Israel; and David went down, and his servants with him, and fought against the Philistines; and David waxed faint.
16 And Ishbibenob, who was of the sons of the giant (rapha), the weight of whose spear was three hundred shekels of brass in weight, he being girded with new armour, thought to have slain David.
17 But Abishai the son of Zeruiah succoured him, and smote the Philistine, and killed him. Then the men of David swore unto him, saying: 'Thou shalt go no more out with us to battle, that thou quench not the lamp of Israel.' (JPS 1917)

Jewish Bible (JPS 1917) translated from Hebrew into English use verse 16 the word rapha, which means the giant such as Jewish Rabbis have translated it. Philistine Ishbibenob was the descendant of the giant.

Saph the descendant of the giant

2 Sam 21:18 And it came to pass after this, that there was again war with the Philistines at Gob; then Sibbecai the Hushathite slew Saph, who was of the sons of the giant (rapha). (JPS 1917)

Philistine Saph was the descendant of the giant.

Champion the descendant of the giant

2 Sam 21:20 And there was again war at Gath, where was a champion, that had on every hand six fingers, and on every foot six toes, four and twenty in number; and he also was born to the giant (rapha). (JPS 1917).

Gath was one of the five most important cities of the Philistines, and it was also the native city of Goliath. The champion from Gath of Philistia was the descendant of the giants.

War againts the Philistines

2 Sam 21:19 And there was again war with the Philistines at Gob; and Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim the Beth-lehemite slew Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver's beam. (JPS 1917)

In this passage is copying error, because David killed Goliath. Some has assumed that the verse should be: Elhanan the son of Jaareoregim, a Bethlehemite, slew the brother of Goliath the Gittite. Goliath was also the descendant of the giant.

Giants of Gath

2 Sam 21:22 These four were born to the giant (rapha) in Gath; and they fell by the hand of David, and by the hand of his servants. (JPS 1917)

In Gath of Philistia lived the descendants of the giants. Israelites with help of God were fearless, and they could win the giants in the battle. This tells also exemplary that sin is like the giant, that a man can't win without help of God. With the help of God the gianst will fall and nation of God receive freedom and promises of God.

Goliath said to Israelites: Am not I a Philistine, and you servants to Saul? choose you a man for you, and let him come down to me. If he be able to fight with me, and to kill me, then will we be your servants: but if I prevail against him, and kill him, then shall you be our servants, and serve us.

The giant of sin wants to make a man for a slave of sin, who serve the filth of sin. This was Goliath's challenge; If you win me, you are free, but if I win you, you must serve me. The giant of sin desire is defeats you, and it will make that, if you trust your own power. Do not trust your own power. David didn't trust himself, but he trusted on God with His help and power. The consequence was that the giant of sin fell down and died.

With the help of God, you can defeat the giants of sin, and you are free to serve God and receive His promises. Miraculous is the grace and power of God and from it evidence is that Israelites have courage to fight against the giants, and they won them with the help of God.

The giant nations

Deut 2:
10 The Emim dwelt therein aforetime, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakim;
11 these also are accounted Rephaim (rephaim), as the Anakim; but the Moabites call them Emim.
....
19 and when thou comest nigh over against the children of Ammon, harass them not, nor contend with them; for I will not give thee of the land of the children of Ammon for a possession; because I have given it unto the children of Lot for a possession. -
20 That also is accounted a land of Rephaim (rephaim): Rephaim (rephaim) dwelt therein aforetime; but the Ammonites call them Zamzummim,
21 a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakim; but the LORD destroyed them before them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead; (JPS 1917)

The Hebrew word rephaim is plural from the word rapha. The Bible tells for many giant nations; Emim, Anakim and Rephaim. The nation of Israel was ahead of the huge challenges, when they must conquer the promised land. King of Bashan

Deut 3:11 For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of the Rephaim (rephaim); behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbah of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man. - (JPS 1917)

According to the Bible, the king of Bashan was the remnant of the giants (the son of Anak). King Og's bed of iron was nine cubits in length, and four cubits in width (about 4.5 meters in length and 2.5 meters in width (about 14.8 feet x 8.2 feet)) (Deut. 3)."

[The mere fact that King Og was legendarily associated with a large bed proves nothing. We still have "King-sized beds" and the luxury of an outsized bed is a status symbol.]

In the original blogradio interview "Giant Talk" I mentioned some of these passages and in particular the Rephaim. The Rephaim are interesting because they came from Over the sea and on the other side of the world by interpretation. And when they are in Israel they are there as part of a Mercenary contingent for the Peoples of the Sea, for that is what the Philistines (Pelishtim) were. The Peoples of the Sea had transoceanic settlements in America, and when they fell back to the Mediterranean, they had some of the Adena Giants in with them: Barry Fell speaks of their particular skull type and conical burial mounds as coming out of a mixture of peoples and appearing on both sides of the Atlantic at the same time.

Here are some definitions from the Mid-East Giants website, derived from standard concordances and other well-known historical documents:
Ras Shamra Texts
Written records recovered from a mound that marks the site of the ancient city of Ugarit, located on the Syrian coast opposite Cyprus, provide a separate verification of the biblical giants.

Found in 1928, these Ras Shamra Texts frequently mention the Rephaim, whose communities apparently ranged that far north. Linguists who deciphered the cuneiform texts say they were written about Joshua's time. Ras Shamra is the modern name given to an ancient mound located on the Syrian coast opposite Cyprus. (See Execration Texts; Israel's Wars with the Giant)

Rephaim GiantsAccording to H. R. Hall, the Rephaim built the megalithic monuments, the dolmens, and the menhirs of Moab and eastern Palestine. Fields of dolmens still may be seen in many parts of northern Jordan. The most notable ones are found in the foothills of the Jordan valley to the east of Damiah bridge, in the foothills east of Talailat Ghassul, around Irbid, and in the hill country near Hasban. (See Argob's Sixty Cities of the Giants; Beit Jibrim)
[interesting that the Giants are directly identified as belonging to the Megalith-Builders, from Western Europe: the Giants as belonging to this culture also remained a feature of the Folklore of those regions in later years, especially in France, Spain and the Mediterranean Islands-and of course, Britain-DD]

Rephaim, Land of the
In the widest sense, the "land of the Rephaim" once comprised all Transjordan and Canaan, because the giants occupied those regions in great numbers. At the time of Israel's invasion, they remained a people to be reckoned with, but their population had dwindled to the extent that the Anakim--their cousin--now dominated the land. Yet, in one place, they retained sufficient numbers and power to be still called the "land of the Rephaim." That territory lay in central Canaan, just north of the Perizzites. Scholars say their large settlement extended from there to perhaps as far as the Valley of Jezreel. (See Abraham and the Giants; Argob's Sixty Cities of the Giants; Beit Jibrim; Israel's Wars with the Giants; Giants, Valley of the)

Rephaim, Valley of the
This abode of the giants was located southwest of Jerusalem, beginning at the valley of Hinnom and stretching three miles along the road to Bethlehem. The valley got its name from some early giant inhabitants called the Rephaim. (See Israel's Wars with the Giants)

And this is from the Wikipedia entry:
Rephaim (Heb. plural רפאים, rendered in contemporary English as Rephaite) is a Northwest Semitic that occurs in the Hebrew Bible as well as other, non-Jewish ancient texts from the region. It can refer to the dead ancestors, who are residents of the Netherworld, or to a mythical race of giants.

Race of giantsIn the Hebrew Bible, "Rephaim" can describe an ancient "race" of giants in Iron Age Israel, or the places where these individuals were thought to have lived: see Gen. 14:5, 15:20; Deut. 2:10-1,20, 3:11,13; Josh. 12:4, 13:12, 15:8, 17:15, 18:16; 2Sam. 5:11,22, 23:13; 1Chr. 11:15, 14:9, 20:4. In the biblical narrative, the Israelites are instructed to exterminate the previous inhabitants of the "promised land," i.e. "Canaan," which include various named peoples, including some unusually tall/large individuals. See the passages listed above in the book of Joshua, and also Deut. 3:11, which implies that Og, the King of Bashan, was one of the last survivors of the Rephaim, and that his bed was 9 cubits long in ordinary cubit. (An ordinary cubit is the length of a man's forearm according to the New American Standard Bible, or approx. 18 inches, which differs from a royal cubit. This makes the bed over 13 feet long.). Anak was a Rephaite (Deuteronomy 2:11).

The area of Moab at Ar, (the region East of the Jordan) before the time of Moses, was also considered the land of the Rephaites. Deuteronomy 2:18-21 refers to the fact that Ammonites called them "Zamzummim", which is related to the Hebrew word זמזם, which literally translates into "Buzzers", or "the people whose speech sounds like buzzing." In Arabic the word زمزم (zamzama) translates as "to rumble, roll (thunder); murmur".

Barry Fell also makes a case that the Hopewellian Mound-Builders were Iberians and thus descendants of the Tartessians, also Peoples of the Sea. Both Adenas and Hopewells had Tartessian connections. And Austin Whittal of the Patagonian Monsters site had noticed independantly of me that several of the South American reports of Giant remains mentioned the oddly vertical braincase and flat back to the heads of these Giants, which I had remarked in the "Giant Talk" interview was also the characteristic head form of the Adenas.

I might also add that it is a common error to equate the Rephaim and the Nephilim simply because both are described as big. That is an error. The Nephilim that were supposed to be the offspring of the Fallen Angels were also supposed to have been killed in the Deluge of Noah, and in fact they are commonly given as the reason for sending the deluge. If some of them survived, God's plan in sending the Deluge was for nothing. But there is no reason to equate the Nephilim and the Rephaim. The latter included all reports of the deformed Giants (Gigantes in Greek) of the Bible. There is nothing to suggest the Nephilm were not handsome and perfectly formed, but simply larger than usual and given to bullying behaviour. That is also what the Bible says.

I never did understand why several commentators insisted there was only one kind of Giant mentioned in the Bible when clearly at least two distinct types were described, and the first type was supposed to have been killed off by the Flood.

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